Republicans Keep Dancing with Autocracy

With almost every passing day I cringe at what the Republican Party has become.  Between the constant misogyny of the sexual predator in chief in the White House, relentless attacks on the truth and the utterly foul Mitch McConnell, it's as if we are witnessing a reprise of some of the worse aspects of rise of the Nazis in Germany.  Most disturbing is that most Republicans continue to ignore the assaults on the rule of law and relentless lying.  Holding on to political power now means more than anything else, including office holders' pledge to uphold and defend the United States Constitution.  Some it would seem would sell their elderly mothers for pocket change in exchange for another term in office.  The recounts following the midterm elections have made Republican hideousness even worse and with the exception of George Conway's new group Republicans seem to be all in in supporting a would be autocrat (for Fox News viewers, that means a dictator).  A column in the Washington Post looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

When a national leader urges that votes be ignored, or that an election result he doesn’t like might best be set aside, we label him an autocrat or an authoritarian.

When it’s President Trump, we shrug. Worse, many in his party go right along with his baseless charges of fraud.

We are in for a difficult two years. Surviving them will require that Republican senators take seriously the pledge they made in their oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” What we have seen so far is not encouraging.

Florida brings out the worst in Republicans. They find it hard to break bad habits developed during the 2000 presidential election, during which they were willing to use any means necessary (including a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision rooted far more in partisanship than law) to prevent Democrat Al Gore from getting a recount. The contest was ultimately settled by 537 votes. . The GOP stopped the recounts, and George W. Bush became president.

To its credit, Florida now requires automatic recounts when races are decided by narrow margins. And this year, Republicans shouldn’t have much to worry about. In the U.S. Senate contest, as of Wednesday morning, Republican Gov. Rick Scott enjoyed a 12,562-vote lead over Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson. In the governor’s race, Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis led Democrat Andrew Gillum by 33,684 votes. Unless something is badly amiss — in which case a recount is imperative — such margins would typically survive close scrutiny. But Trump would have none of it.

For starters, as The Post’s Fact Checker noted, overseas and military ballots postmarked by Election Day are accepted as long as 10 days after the voting. So Trump, the day after Veterans Day, was suggesting that many of the ballots sent in by our service members not be counted at all.

Then there was Trump’s tweet last Friday suggesting that “a new Election” might be required in Arizona as Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema passed Republican Rep. Martha McSally in the vote count of their U.S. Senate race. With her golden retriever Boomer at her side, McSally ignored Trump and graciously conceded to Sinema in a video on Monday. McSally is clearly thinking beyond the Trumpian present.

All this is about more than Trump’s obvious meltdown since an election that was bad for him and his party — and gets worse as more votes are tallied. It is about whether Republicans are willing to contain and, when necessary, oppose a man who repeatedly demonstrates hostility to the rules, norms and constraints of constitutional democracy.

It was, thus, good news this week when 14 conservative and libertarian lawyers announced the formation of a new organization called Checks and Balances. Its ranks include George T. Conway III , who happens to be the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and former homeland security secretary and Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge.

Their organizing statement declared the group’s dedication to “the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights, and the necessity of civil discourse.”

Tellingly, they insisted that their commitment to these principles applied “regardless of the party or persons in power” and reflected their faith in “free speech, a free press, separation of powers and limited government.”

Up to now, conservatives opposed to Trump have had little impact on their party. Too many, especially among elected officials, have pulled their punches in the crunch and fallen silent under pressure.

The test will be whether four or five GOP senators prove willing to break with Trump’s apologists in their party’s leadership when it matters — and when it’s hard. Defending the Florida recount as legitimate and necessary would be a good start. So would supporting a bill protecting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and insisting that his findings be made public. Lovely words about the truth and the rule of law are powerless against a [would be tyrant] president who respects neither.

The Constitutional Crisis Has Begun

Many scoffed when I and others suggested that Donald Trump wanted to be an autocrat in the style of Vladimir Putin, Mussolini and/or Hitler.  Yet, now, based on a memo that has leaked, Trump and his lawyers - a questionable lot in some cases - are asserting that Trump is above the law.  Indeed, the law is whatever he says it is and he can end or launch investigations by the FBI or Justice Department on a whim or in the midst of a temper tantrum.   Thus, there can be no obstruction of justice if Trump is the one engaging in obstruction.  Moreover, Trump can pardon himself.  In short, Trump is akin to a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch in the Europe of old.  If Trump persists in these demands and delusions, we have arrived at a full blown constitutional crisis.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are highlights:

For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of a coming constitutional crisis has loomed over the Russia investigation. The newly leaked memo by Trump’s lawyers, obtained by the New York Times, suggests that such a crisis is not merely a likelihood, but that it has already begun.

The memo proposes several tendentious interpretations of the publicly available facts of Trump’s behavior, along with some legally questionable and amateurish citations of precedent. But the most important passage is its sweeping assertion of presidential authority.

“The President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction,” they write, “Put simply, the Constitution leaves no question that the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.”

The implications of this authority are breathtaking. Trump, in their view, has unlimited control to open or close any federal investigation.

Trump has been angrily tweeting demands that the investigation into him and his allies be halted, and that the Department of Justice instead open investigations into his political enemies. These tweets have been treated as the ravings of a blowhard who just happens to occupy the most powerful position in the world, yet is somehow merely blowing off steam.

Should Trump’s legal case prevail in the courts — and the legality of such broad claims remains largely untested — it would confer upon any president, but immediately Trump, the ability to open charges against anybody the president wants to charge, and prevent investigations of anybody the president wants to protect, beginning with himself. This is l’état, c’est moi rendered as a formal legal case.

Trump cannot obstruct justice, according to his official legal stance, because justice is whatever Trump says it is. Before this is over, either Trump’s sweeping claim will survive, or the rule of law will, but not both.

A column in the Washington Post also commented on these dangerous and unprecedented - and untrue - assertions.  Here are Excerpts:

The lawyers made a variety of jaw-dropping claims and admissions. For starters, the lawyers admit that Trump dictated on Air Force One an explanation for a June 2016 meeting held with a Russian lawyer. This directly contradicts prior assertions from Sekulow that Trump had nothing to do with the statement, which set out a false explanation for the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and assorted Russian figures. 

We should pause right there to consider the confession, for that is what it is, that the president put out a statement falsely portraying a meeting that was related to an ongoing investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 presidential election. Even defenders of broad presidential power to hire and fire executive branch employees lack an argument that drafting a fake explanation to throw off an ongoing investigation is somehow within Trump’s Article II powers. A pack of constitutional experts savaged the argument that Trump could never be prosecuted for obstruction. Daniel Hemel writes:

The Declaration of Independence charged King George III with “obstruct[ing] the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to the laws for establishing judiciary powers.” That alone is evidence that the founding generation did not believe that heads of state were immune from obstruction charges. And while Article II instructs the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” that does not give him carte blanche to wield his law enforcement powers any way he chooses.

Laurence Tribe likewise tweeted: “Trump’s lawyers’ sweepingly Nixonian claim of unbounded presidential power is inconsistent with the core American principle that no-one is above the law. It would mean that even pardoning someone in return for a bribe is just fine. That’s simply wrong.” Trump’s lawyers, in making such a ludicrous claim of power, make both a constitutional and political error. The political error is nearly as great as the constitutional flaw is (i.e. we are not an absolute monarchy). Democrats have been struggling with how to address the “I” word (impeachment) in the campaign. Now they have the most powerful argument imaginable in the first referendum on the president since his election: Republicans support Trump’s claim to absolute power; Democrats do not. Which party should we have control Congress?
 Where does this leave us? Trump and his attorneys are prepared to argue that his power is near absolute to shut down investigations into his own conduct and that in any event he could pardon himself. That is not the system we have, but we are heading toward that constitutional face-off — especially if voters return GOP majorities ready to defend Trump’s claims to unfettered power.

Autocracy: Rules for Survival

We are hearing much from the lamestream mainstream media about the "peaceful transition of power" and other mealy mouthed platitudes in the wake of Tuesday election that are trying to normalize something that is anything but normal.  A totally unqualified, probably mentally unstable individual with delusions that he will be a Vladimir Putin-like supreme autocrat of America was elected president.  It is the height of irresponsibility to try to make the abnormal and dangerous seem normal.  Even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got into the act of nice sounding platitudes rather than stating outright that America is truly f*cked if something is not done to block Trump from office or at a minimum rein him in.  Sticking one's head in the sand and ignoring reality is NOT the answer.  Rather clear headed thinking and recognizing the nature of the danger is what is required.  As is resistance in every way feasible.  A piece in the New York Review of Books focuses on what must now be done.  Here are highlights:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday. Instead, she said, resignedly,

We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. . . . 

Similar refrains were heard from various members of the liberal commentariat, with Tom Friedman vowing, “I am not going to try to make my president fail,” to Nick Kristof calling on “the approximately 52 percent majority of voters who supported someone other than Donald Trump” to “give president Trump a chance.”

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

More dangerously, Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. . . . . 

Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.

To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets again—but by that time Dubnow had been killed.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues. Coverage, and thinking, will drift in a Trumpian direction, just as it did during the campaign

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an “amazing victory for the American worker,” Republican politicians have fallen into line. . . . Those who argue for cooperation will make the case, much as President Obama did in his speech, that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be willfully ignoring the corrupting touch of autocracy, from which the future must be protected.

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.